Which Map Software For My Etrex Legend?

[+LCAS-271]

I'm wanting to get some sort of map software for my Legend but dont know which one to get. I'm mostly wanting software that would be able to display county roads and local highways while I'm out GCing. I've noticed that alot of people use topos but I'm not sure if it would do me any good. Any ideas?

[+Seth!]

I'd like to know, too. How do I find out what software the Legend can use? Does it have to be Garmin? I have MS MapPoint and Rand McNally Streetfinder. It would be nice if I didn't have to buy more, since MapSource is $117 apparently.

[+Chuy!]

Yes, it has to be Garmin's MapSource software. Specifically, MetroGuide, which goes for $85 at most reputable GPS internet dealers. I prefer offroute.com as I have not had a problem with them after purchasing four GPS's for work and personal.

 

Just noticed MetroGuide V6 is still available at offroute.com for $50. V7 is $85. Move it or lose it.

Edited June 17, 2006 by Chuy!

[+Seth!]

Thanks, Chuy!

 

Bummer about the exclusivity of the software.

 

- !

[+briansnat]

If you have a Legend (not a Legend C or CX), you are best off getting Mapsource Topo. Metroguide, City Select and City Navigator (unless you live in Alaska, or Montana) chew up a lot of memory. If you live in a major population center you won't get very much map coverage at all with any of those three, so Topo, though flawed, is the way to go with the Legend.

[bennyk]

If you have a Legend (not a Legend C or CX), you are best off getting Mapsource Topo. Metroguide, City Select and City Navigator (unless you live in Alaska, or Montana) chew up a lot of memory. If you live in a major population center you won't get very much map coverage at all with any of those three, so Topo, though flawed, is the way to go with the Legend.

 

Is there a way to figure the specifics about how much you can store with each of these? I am in a similar situation with my Vista Cx 64MB card, and wondering how much more I can really put on that card, or whether I'll need to get a new card if I buy one of these map sets.

[+Munin]

Is there a way to figure the specifics about how much you can store with each of these? I am in a similar situation with my Vista Cx 64MB card, and wondering how much more I can really put on that card, or whether I'll need to get a new card if I buy one of these map sets.

The amount of storage needed for a given area can vary greatly. For City Select it depends on how dense the road network is. For US Topo it depends on the feature density (lots of hills/mountains == lots of contour lines == more storage). But like briansnat mentioned, the topo maps for an area use a lot less space than the street maps. Just to give you a feel for things, here's a couple of examples of how much you could store if you were in the New York City area (figured I'd go with that since you logged a couple of virts there).

 

If you filled the 64MB card with City Select maps, you could cover an area like the following - the pinkish areas show a selection of maps that would come in just under 64MB total:

 

 

If instead you filled the card with US Topo maps you could cover a much wider area, although you wouldn't have any detailed street info:

 

 

If you bought both City Select and US Topo, you could also load both sets of maps onto the GPSr, and switch between them depending on whether you were driving or hiking - that's actually what I do. A combination of full streets and topos around the NYC area that fits in 64MB might look like this:

 

 

Basically if you compare that to the first image (which was City Select without US Topo), you'll see that I've taken off coverage for the tip of Long Island and some of the CT coastline, and reduced the coverage west of NYC a bit. Since the topo maps take up less space than the street maps, you can ditch a relatively small amount of street map coverage and use the savings to bring in a fairly large amount of topo coverage.

 

You can play lots of games to trade off space usage between street and topo maps. Maybe you only care about topos for the Catskills, so you select a couple of those topo maps but don't bother with topos for the rest of the area - that'd leave more space to use for street maps. Or maybe you're planning a caching vacation up to Lake George, so you could download a different set of maps that had streets and topos running up I-87 but leave out Long Island and northern Jersey.

 

I don't have City Navigator, so I'm not sure how the coverage on that goes. My understanding is that the current version of Navigator (ver 7) uses significantly bigger map segments than City Select uses, which might limit the ability to play trade-off games. Maybe someone else can provide some examples of what you can do with 64MB and City Navigator?

[+JFDavis (Orion 6)]

If you have a Legend (not a Legend C or CX), you are best off getting Mapsource Topo. Metroguide, City Select and City Navigator (unless you live in Alaska, or Montana) chew up a lot of memory. If you live in a major population center you won't get very much map coverage at all with any of those three, so Topo, though flawed, is the way to go with the Legend.

 

Is there a way to figure the specifics about how much you can store with each of these? I am in a similar situation with my Vista Cx 64MB card, and wondering how much more I can really put on that card, or whether I'll need to get a new card if I buy one of these map sets.

 

I have a Legend (2 actually). Each chunk of map has a size. As you select the desired map area in one part of the Mapsource window you get a visible shading to show the extent of your selection and map coverage, a map name added to a list of chunks in a second window and a running accumulation of the space required at the bottom of the 'chunk' list. I'm in a rather less dense area-still a city-I get all of the Metroguide for the city proper and topo maps for an adjacent range of foothills and mountains.

[bennyk]

This is awesome, thanks for clarifying this for me. You can really cover quite a bit of area with 64MB, what I would probably do is just change the maps if I was going somewhere else.

 

Of course, now this has given me a pretty good excuse to buy the extra sets of maps, which is all I need to do right now

[+Miragee]

The City Select maps are great for auto-routing. I got a good deal on them in a combination package with the beanbag auto-mount and cigarette-lighter adapter for about $145.00.

 

For the monochrome Legend, with only 8MB of map memory, the Topo maps are probably the best choice, unless you can get a copy of the old Roads and Recreation maps. I found those on eBay for a reasonable price.

[+Chuy!]

If you have a Legend (not a Legend C or CX), you are best off getting Mapsource Topo. Metroguide, City Select and City Navigator (unless you live in Alaska, or Montana) chew up a lot of memory. If you live in a major population center you won't get very much map coverage at all with any of those three, so Topo, though flawed, is the way to go with the Legend.

I disagree on the chew up memory thing. I have MetroGuide V5 for my Vista. To download maps, you select regions. None in San Diego, Orange or Los Angeles County are more than 2.63 mb. All of San Diego County plus parts of Riverside County take up 7.96mb. Los Angeles Metro down to Long Beach along the 710 (Pasadena to Long Beach- a strip 15 miles wide and 35 miles long) and throwing in Hollywood (9miles x 7miles) uses 7.58mb.

[+markz68]

I too just got a Legend. When I start to upload topo maps, it warns me a couple of times that I am about to permanently overwrite maps installed by Garmin. How do those maps differ from the topo maps? What will I miss by overwriting them?

 

I don't use the Legend for autorouting. I have an i2 for point-to-point routing. Should I go ahead and install the topo maps? How will they help me with geocaching?

[+briansnat]

I disagree on the chew up memory thing. I have MetroGuide V5 for my Vista. To download maps, you select regions. None in San Diego, Orange or Los Angeles County are more than 2.63 mb. All of San Diego County plus parts of Riverside County take up 7.96mb. Los Angeles Metro down to Long Beach along the 710 (Pasadena to Long Beach- a strip 15 miles wide and 35 miles long) and throwing in Hollywood (9miles x 7miles) uses 7.58mb.

 

Which proves my point. That isn't a whole lot of map coverage. You can drive out of your map coverage range in as little as 15 minutes if you are running that on a Legend.

Edited June 19, 2006 by briansnat

[+Miragee]

I too just got a Legend. When I start to upload topo maps, it warns me a couple of times that I am about to permanently overwrite maps installed by Garmin. How do those maps differ from the topo maps? What will I miss by overwriting them?

 

I don't use the Legend for autorouting. I have an i2 for point-to-point routing. Should I go ahead and install the topo maps? How will they help me with geocaching?

If you are out hiking, the Topo maps can be very helpful. You can see streams, contour lines, dirt roads, streets, and other things like mines and peaks. I use the City Select for auto-routing on my Vista C, but when I am hiking, I switch over to view my Topo maps.

 

Edit to add appropriate quote

Edited June 18, 2006 by Miragee

[+JFDavis (Orion 6)]

I too just got a Legend. When I start to upload topo maps, it warns me a couple of times that I am about to permanently overwrite maps installed by Garmin. How do those maps differ from the topo maps? What will I miss by overwriting them?

 

I don't use the Legend for autorouting. I have an i2 for point-to-point routing. Should I go ahead and install the topo maps? How will they help me with geocaching?

 

You would be 'erasing' the marine point database. Something like a basemap version of the Bluechart. There are ways to recover and reload this 'basemap'. It was, at an earlier time, on the garmin site. I just checked; it's still there. You go thru the manual upgrade procedure with the license page etc; it's off on the right side.

 

The Legend keeps it's preloaded basemap-I think all Garmin GPSrs do-it's hard coded. You replace a 'lite' version of the marine map.

 

Topo is a marginally useful topographical map-similar to the paper ones with natural features like hills and valleys, bodies of water. Alongside a real paper Topo it can keep you from falling off a cliff. Seriously though, it's much easier to 'see' a topo feature and match it to a real feature than dead reconning(sp) from some point in civilization (like the end of a road). Where civilization is within visual range I frequently use just the Legend and the loaded topo maps for caching, walking, hiking, biking. Further off the beaten path a compas and a real paper topo map are the best additional equipment advice.

[+JFDavis (Orion 6)]

I disagree on the chew up memory thing. I have MetroGuide V5 for my Vista. To download maps, you select regions. None in San Diego, Orange or Los Angeles County are more than 2.63 mb. All of San Diego County plus parts of Riverside County take up 7.96mb. Los Angeles Metro down to Long Beach along the 710 (Pasadena to Long Beach- a strip 15 miles wide and 35 miles long) and throwing in Hollywood (9miles x 7miles) uses 7.58mb.

 

Which proves my point. That isn't a whole lot of map coverage. You can drive out of your map coverage range in as little as 15 minutes if you are running that on a Legend.

 

Twice now you've made this point. And twice I find something to agree with in your comments and something to disagree with. If the user is in a high density area-say any large city with maybe a million or so people, the Legend may be cumbersome to use. One would need to limit map loadout to just what was needed. And replace as needed-hey they called them map-sets for a reason! But in a less dense area the Legend is 'perfectly' workable-I live in New Mexico.

 

My Legend holds a Metroguide swath completely covering the major north-south interstate-500+ miles long by 50-100 miles wide and the region of Topo maps that make-up my 'back yard' about 500,000 acres give or take the odd 10,000 acres. Certainly more than 15 minutes even by jet. If I need to work in the southern half of the state it will hold that entire half of the Metroguide and the relavent Topos with room to spare-same with the north half or east or west.

 

But it's all irrelavent. The original poster 'has' the Legend. The best answer for them is the one that gets them started at using what they have in a productive manner. The Legend is a great 'little' device. It's got a small heart (capacity), but it beats strong! If you run off your maps then either you planned badly or ....

[+briansnat]

I disagree on the chew up memory thing. I have MetroGuide V5 for my Vista. To download maps, you select regions. None in San Diego, Orange or Los Angeles County are more than 2.63 mb. All of San Diego County plus parts of Riverside County take up 7.96mb. Los Angeles Metro down to Long Beach along the 710 (Pasadena to Long Beach- a strip 15 miles wide and 35 miles long) and throwing in Hollywood (9miles x 7miles) uses 7.58mb.

 

Which proves my point. That isn't a whole lot of map coverage. You can drive out of your map coverage range in as little as 15 minutes if you are running that on a Legend.

 

Twice now you've made this point. And twice I find something to agree with in your comments and something to disagree with. If the user is in a high density area-say any large city with maybe a million or so people, the Legend may be cumbersome to use. One would need to limit map loadout to just what was needed. And replace as needed-hey they called them map-sets for a reason! But in a less dense area the Legend is 'perfectly' workable-I live in New Mexico.

 

My Legend holds a Metroguide swath completely covering the major north-south interstate-500+ miles long by 50-100 miles wide and the region of Topo maps that make-up my 'back yard' about 500,000 acres give or take the odd 10,000 acres. Certainly more than 15 minutes even by jet. If I need to work in the southern half of the state it will hold that entire half of the Metroguide and the relavent Topos with room to spare-same with the north half or east or west.

 

But it's all irrelavent. The original poster 'has' the Legend. The best answer for them is the one that gets them started at using what they have in a productive manner. The Legend is a great 'little' device. It's got a small heart (capacity), but it beats strong! If you run off your maps then either you planned badly or ....

 

I don't disagree with this. 8 megs will give you ample coverage using Metroguide, City Select or CN if you live away from a major population center. But if you do live near one, Topo is the way to go.